by Duncan Shields | Aug 1, 2011 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I was sixteen when they came.
They touched down in large ships all over earth, silently with no visible means of propulsion. Jagged, asymmetrical leviathans ridged with glowing seams and thousands of softly humming translucent spikes as tall as skyscrapers. Their spindled undercarriages contacted the ground and there they impossibly balanced, footprints with no more square footage than a volkwagen bug. Islands on tiptoe with their furthest spires still in space.
A triangle of light spasmed open in their base and they came out.
They floated silently and ghostly like their ships did. They were made of a dark metal that could be made intangible at will. Red sensors ringed their masses. No two of them were the same size. Their appendages dangled, chunky black tentacles of many different widths, some cables nearly dragging on the ground as the beings floated out of their vessels. The smallest one I saw was as long as a cat and the largest was the length of a bus balanced on its bumper.
The missiles we’d fired at their ships at first contact still hung there in the upper atmosphere, barely moving in some sort of time-retardant field. The bullets and shells that had been fired at them from the ground troops did the same. So we stopped. We didn’t know if our stilled ordnance would go off when the visitors left. Our noisy impotence in the face of their silent superiority became embarrassing.
They scanned everything. They took no interest in us except to regard those that came close to them with a whirring chirp of blindingly quick quadrary math. Scientists and mathematicians figured out their language but the numbers still didn’t make sense.
Small ones for flowers but long ones for gardens, small ones for trees and massive ones for forests. Medium ones for buildings but huge ones for cities. London’s number was bigger than Vancouver. Damascus had a larger number that Paris. Water seemed to make the math go recursive and eat itself.
A temporal theoretician named Davis figured it out after some terminally ill humans approached the aliens in search of a divine cure. They were measured and forgotten by the aliens and left disappointed to succumb to their diseases. Those measurement numbers took on meaning after their deaths.
We don’t know how long they’ll be here but the aliens appear to know how long each of us will live.
People seek them out now. It’s a dare to get yourself measured. New parents bring their children, newlyweds find out how long they’ll have together, and one presidential candidate famously got measured at a press conference but the result was scandalously disappointing.
The aliens seemed to have a sense of time like we have a sense of smell. Common opinion is that the passage of time whorls around them and that they are more sensitive to it. That they smell time in chains and whips, in spills and gusts, in pours and dams. When we speak to them, they seem to only measure our word lengths and move on. Perhaps they’re entropy police cataloguing the known universe. We don’t know if they’re sentient or automated.
We are not intelligent life to them. They speak in measurements and nothing else. How they invented space travel is a mystery to us.
All I know is that I was measured yesterday and I have another forty-three years to live. I plan to make them count.
by submission | Jul 31, 2011 | Story
Author : Waldo van der Waal
I sat down heavily on the rickety chair at my console. A quick look towards my brother confirmed that he, too, was feeling the firm fingers of fatigue. Four straight days of coding will do that to you. Four straight days of inventing and shaping and testing… I opened a couple of beers and passed one to Stephan, who sipped from it with gusto. After he wiped his lips, he said: “I’ll flip you for it.”
Going back to our childhood, we always decided things by chance. Never age or skill or any kind of decree – just by a roll of the dice; a flip of the coin. And each of us had the scars to prove that the odds really are 50/50. “Do you think that’s what the Wright brothers did?” I asked him, drawing deep from my beer. His rejoinder was quick: “Does it matter? Can you remember who was piloting their flyer when they first flew? Everyone knows the Wright Brothers. Not many people know them individually.”
So I relented. He fished a coin from his pockets, and got ready for the flip. As the coin left his thumb, I called “heads” – I always called heads – and watched as he caught the coin and clapped it firmly on the back of his other hand. A quick look in my eyes, with a little wink, then he lifted his hand: Tails. Stephan had won.
From that moment on, we both knew how the rest of the evening would play out. He went to get ready, while I prepared the device. To anyone peeking into our shed, the myriad of wires and pipes and screens would’ve looked just as alien as the Wright Brothers’ flyer must’ve done more than 100 years ago. But they believed they were onto something good – and Stephan and I? We knew we were onto something good as well. Something that could shape the course of human life for eons to come – if only we could give it wings, like the Wrights did.
Stephan walked back into the shed just as I finished preparing. He had on a pair of faded blue jeans, a t-shirt and a leather bomber jacket. Old-fashioned but classic – perfect for our test. He glanced at me, smiled nervously, and proceeded to affix himself to the device – straps, cables, electrodes… He knew the drill.
Then, when he was ready, I looked fondly at my brother, and cleared my throat to say something. But he held up his hand, stopping me before I could say anything. He looked around our shed, maybe checking that everything was ready, or maybe taking it all in once more – the dusty equipment, the haphazard technology… Then he nodded at me.
I walked over to my console, and with just the briefest of looks towards Stephan, I executed the command. There was no sound. No light, no fanfare… But even so, Stephan had disappeared in a millionth of a second. The electrodes and wires swung lazily backwards and forwards, in the spot occupied until moments ago by my brother.
by submission | Jul 30, 2011 | Story
Author : Asher Wismer
“When do you have to leave?”
“Couple weeks.”
“Is it set in stone?”
“You know I can’t stay in one place for longer than a month. Guild rules.”
She lay quiet, pressed against him.
“Maybe you could put in for a leave?”
He pushed up one his arm, looking down at her warm body, framed in blue lines from the ceiling vents.
“I can’t stay,” he said. “I have a job to do. I service this whole sector.”
“But I thought — maybe you wanted to stay?”
“With you, you mean.”
“We’re very good together. I feel–”
“For me? Or because you’re lonely?”
“I want you to stay.”
He settled back in the cushions. The blue star overhead glowed dimly, in its passive phase for a year before the flare season started.
“How long is your service here?” he asked.
“Fifteen years, and then I retire.”
“Do you know how long I’ve been traveling?”
“I don’t know.”
“Twenty years in personal-time. I stopped paying attention to real-time after the first month. Every time I get into the FTL pod the universe goes on without me. I can’t worry about it.”
“I’ve only taken the trip once,” she said. “To get here.”
“We don’t stay anywhere because we have to keep moving. I have a thousand more assignments to service before I can retire. That’s one per month, and I’m twenty years down. I have sixty to go.”
“Real-time?”
“It makes no difference. I don’t age in the FTL pod. I think I started my tenure over a hundred real-time years ago, but it doesn’t matter too much. All the out-system stations need us, and we can’t stay or the system breaks down.”
She was crying, silently. “But you could stay. We could send a tightbeam to your Control Network and they could take you off the rolls. We can live here together.”
“I don’t travel to settle down,” he said. “I travel to make sure none of you go mad from the isolation. We have no other purpose.”
“You have free will. You can choose to stay.”
“And the next station has to wait an extra month for personal and sexual contact,” he said. “It’s not possible.”
“So go now, then,” she said, a sudden surge of anger drying the tears. “No sense keeping them waiting. I’ll just wait here for the next gigolo to stop by. You have no other purpose, after all.”
“Whatever you want,” he said. “I’m here to service you and you alone. If you want me to go–”
“No! Don’t leave me!” She came up and clutched him, desperate, feeling for his face and pulling him down in a passionate kiss. They coupled hard and fast and she slept in peace. When she woke up, he was making breakfast.
“Are you ok?” he said.
“I’m sorry. It gets harder every year. I’ll be fine.”
“I can stay my whole shift here, if you want, so you only have three months to wait for the next one.”
“That would be nice.”
He brought her coffee and they drank together, looking up at the vents where the blue sun shone. Instruments on the asteroid’s surface constantly recorded and transmitted information about the star’s cycles, valuable information for the Collective.
“It’s not so bad,” she said at last. “I’ll get over you. But I’ll be dead long before you retire.”
“I’ll remember you.”
“Promise?”
He looked out at the stars. A hundred lightyears to the next station, and a hundred more after that, and further and more and on and on.
“Forever,” he said, and smiled.
by submission | Jul 29, 2011 | Story
Author : Julian Miles
John was quite something to see when he got his threatening on. The bioluminescents lacing his body in intricate whorls and knotwork turned varying shades of red or white as his eyes darkened to black. The natives were terrified of him. Which was the whole idea. Natively inhabited water worlds were an unplumbed resource due to the difficulty of establishing relations with them.
John had left the military when his pod was slaughtered. I became his podmate by virtue of being the only aquatic physiognomy specialist turned freerun trader. We ran our ship half wet, half dry. It meant we could trade in stupid gravity zones and get places sane or dry people couldn’t. Plus John’s part dolphin, part shark splicestry gave us kudos in the oddest places. All of which got us a lead to our latest splashdown.
Karessia was named after Trutch Karessin, the first man to discover the locals here regarded humans as a delicacy, not as peers. Which is why I was in a zerosee suit and John was handling the diplomacy. This was entirely based on the local religious tendency to shun places where the influence of their god of death was felt. We were just making the influence a little more visible above the patrium node we had located.
John came hammering past me, tail moving swiftly but with relaxed power as his pectoral fins handled the manoeuvring. I could tell he was grinning, but that was only because he’d told me that was what the little biosparks by his mouth meant.
“Flee for your lives! The Reaper of the Colossus is here!”
Oh, how he loved this bit. His broad spectrum sonic roar hit the Karessians and they scattered, frantically trying to genuflect and swim away simultaneously. I was about to instruct the ship for a plant drop when John’s red and white turned blue and green, his primaries of confusion.
“Dave, we may have a problem.”
I scooted my rig over to him and took a look over his dorsal fin. Hanging in the blue, right on the colour change between high water and deep water was the oldest Karessian I had ever seen. Wrinkled over his entire body, but still muscled like an athlete. His left hands clutched a truly formidable polearm, its head reflecting highlights from John’s luminescence. His right hands were behind the shield that covered his entire right side.
“Amp your spectrum analysers, Dave. That shield and the pointy end of the big stick came from the same thing, and I don’t think it was a rock from around here.”
I was about to hit the analysers when something occurred to me. I hit the lights instead. This far down, the simplest things became obscure. The bright white light made the Karessian duck his head behind his shield, but it made the letters on that piece of metal leap into view. Two rows of text, in English. Wonder and a prick of fear intruded on my routine.
‘VEY SHI’
‘LOSSUS’
“John, I think we’ve lost a mining opportunity and made a fortune.”
“Dave, I think you’re wasting valuable lost survey vessel listing query time.”
by submission | Jul 28, 2011 | Story
Author : Michael Georgilis
Always follow this rule: never go to a hospital. No exceptions. Heal as best you can if someone is hurt. Abandon someone who can’t or won’t move. Tell them this risk when they join you. Friends help you survive. People who endanger your survival are no longer friends. Offer friends a bullet if you leave them. If they accept, remove the head afterwards. Cremate. Move on.
Scratches are minor. Bites are death. Friends should tell friends if they are bitten. Friends who hide their bites are no longer friends. Pity them. Do not keep them. Tell them this risk when they join you. Give them a bullet, or let them do it themselves. Some will try to fight back. Be ready. Remove the head. Cremate. Move on. Grieve on the road.
Know your enemy. Do they shamble? Do they run? Run away from shamblers. Drive away from runners. No matter what, move. Be paranoid. Travel during the day. Eight out of ten deaths occur at night. Don’t become a statistic. Cut your hair short. No ponytails. Easy grab spots. Wear close fitting clothes. Take extras for tourniquets. Wear coats for weather only. Wear running shoes. Take only what you can run comfortably with. Sleep in safe houses. Have two escape plans. Set up watch shifts. Cry, but be alert. Watch the dark like it would swallow you if you didn’t.
Defend yourself. Guns are obvious and dangerous. Aim for the head. Never shoot twice if once will suffice. Always reload. Clean your weapon. You are always one jam away from death. Avoid combat. Always look for ways to circumvent. Converse ammo. Have back up. Use shotguns for crowd control and bottle necks. Fire and run backwards. Never fight without a full magazine if possible. Count your shots. Three shots left, the battle is over. Run. Use these bullets with care. Two for escape. One for you. Choke on the muzzle. Point up. Think of home before pulling. Move on.
Scrounge with intent. Go as a group or not at all. They are never alone. You shouldn’t be either. Listen before entering. Moaning, shuffling, you leave. Desperation is the only exception. Enter with firepower. Create bottlenecks. Have two fall back points. Have an escape plan. If it’s clear, move quickly. Ignore the smell and the bodies. Take only what you can run comfortably with. Move on.
Know your locations. Malls are bad. Offices are bad. Hospitals are worst. Off shore is best. Prisons are good for long-term stays on land. Useful for headquarters to a large group of friends. If the coast is not an option, search for a prison and lots of friends.
When you find a haven, sweep the place. Fight for it. Don’t let it go. Set up homes. Regulate food intake. Attempt to grow sustenance. Make decisions as a group. Laugh. If food growth allows, friends can become closer. Skeletons can regain their flesh, their smiles, and reclaim the mantle the virus annihilated long ago.
Never count on permanency. Food, medicine, equipment runs low. Always be prepared. Exercise. Practice. Leave as a final option. Things are different in havens.
But the rules stay the same.
